Free The Private Wound by Nicholas Blake Page A

coarseness. The delicate wrists and ears and ankles: the coarse, fat upper arms, the buttocks which felt as hard as polished marble. The absurd genteel mouthings when she ate; the foul language she used, the hobbledehoy teasings: but also a touching simplicity of mind.
    â€œI’d been pure so long till you came,” she said to me once.
    â€œ
Pure
?”
    â€œYou know what I mean.” She blushed faintly.
    I did. It was such an extraordinary word to use. Nor did I entirely believe her, for she had implied more than once that Kevin’s pass at her had been followed through—though perhaps that was said just to rouse my jealousy.
    She would be called a nymphomaniac to-day, no doubt. She was certainly insatiable. Yet, when we lay together, she used none of the experienced woman’s verbal tricks to arouse me, none of that shameless, titillating love-talk. Her lust put on no trimmings: it was simple as an animal’s.
    It was only in public that she was shameless, walking with me through Charlottestown, jeering at me and wrestling with me, like a child, in front of her husband’s eyes. I never ceased to be embarrassed by this. But I learnt to close that part of my mind which liked Flurry, and use only the part which had grown to think of him as a complaisant cuckold and a bore.
    Did Harriet plan her campaign? I simply don’t know. After our first flare-up, she would sometimes let a week or ten days pass before she sought me again; and if we did meet, treated me almost with indifference. Was it a calculated way to keep my desire on the boil? Somehow, I suspect not. And yet she enjoyed stratagems, the more outrageous the better. But then she would lose interest completely, become bored and peevish; and again I would wonder if she had it all worked out so as to keep me her slave, in a state of uncertainty.
    One day I would think her a paragon of women; the next day, a whore.
    During the periods she was off me, I was not unhappy. I had my book; and I spent long afternoons wandering around the coast with my field-glasses, watching sea-birds.
    Harriet’s recklessness endeared her to me—and communicated itself to me. She never used contraceptives, for instance, and refused to let me do so. She believed in the “safe period”; and anyway, she said, she had never conceived with Flurry, so obviously she couldn’t with anyone else. It did not seem so obvious to me. But her care-free moods infected me; I was hopelessly infatuated with her, and not in the least deflected from my course by finding a note one evening late in May, propped up against my typewriter—
    LAY OFF IT YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
    I am as cowardly as the next man, and I cannot pretendthis anonymous scrawl gave me no qualms. For a day or two, I felt paranoiac symptoms. But, when I told Harriet about it, she was going through one of her off periods and showed only the most perfunctory concern. Flurry, for some reason, I did not tell. Guilt, no doubt; but also partly because I could not believe him the kind of man to issue anonymous warnings. I used to wonder if this one were the work of the person who had searched my cottage: but what on earth was
he
warning me to lay off?
    Besides, I was caught up in Harriet’s recklessness, and like any young man wanting his girl’s admiration, determined not to let her catch the least whiff of my fear.
    And now the persecution campaign, if that is what it was, seemed to have been dropped. Harriet and I were together again. The assignations by night on the grassy spit recommenced. Sometimes she would walk over to my lonely cottage, and we made love on the floor, too impatient to climb the ladder to the bed upstairs. Wherever we happened to be—under trees in the Lissawn demesne, on a mountainside or on a strand, she would grip me with her delicately strong hands and pull me down. I was enchanted by her. It was a kind of madness. The sun shone all day, burst out from